the techno-social environment

Digital carnival is an endless performance of human extremes—emotions, ambitions, identities. In pursuit of affirmation, we craft symbolic extensions of self—digital masks—and replay ourselves in variations, again and again. Digital media carnivalize identity.

Feelings are the compass of social navigation. They play the same role in social dynamics as the senses do in physical settings: they guide us. To navigate the social-digital, we need to sense the attitudes of others, just as a tribal individual needs to navigate tribal moods and attitudes. Digital reactions of users evolve (or devolve) into

The engagement with digital flow is stimulated by hormonal rewards—evolutionary physiological mechanisms that encourage people to search for something useful and share it with others for bonding and recognition, much like real hunting and gathering.

Essentially, web surfing is a form of digital hunting and gathering—with the goal of finding something to feed curiosity and share with others for social gains.

in today’s social media environment, identity is behavior. Every action on social media is identity signaling that serves as a request for affirmation. Signaling identity is the digital labor that turns into the perks of socialization within respective digital tribes.

Media are the hardware of society—the hardware has evolved from expressing ideas to centering on identities. The software—our culture—has followed suit. Identity politics mirrors the development of media, reflecting its cultural consequences.

On social media, passive audiences of the literacy era reversed into participants expressing thoughts and emotions as in oral communication. Algorithms track their preferences through countless identity markers. The entire design is built to reward identity signaling.

Identity politics is a media effect. Over time, communication media have evolved from forms that largely ignored human differences to forms that now emphasize and spotlight them.

When digital media reversed cognitive detachment into situational immersion, it set off other reversals. The structured, fixed world built by literacy reversed into a “natural” flow: the newsfeed pouring into our devices. The flow has no structure or completeness, typical of literacy. As soon as structuring, selection, and completeness are